The blowhards at MSNBC’s Morning Joe should realize that continuing to shoot lies through their whitened tooth implants on the air about Elon Musk doesn’t make them any more true. What’s worse is that they don’t even attempt to be clever about it.
Both hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were popping their brain corks over Musk’s March 10 interview with Fox Business host Larry Kudlow. Both just lied about the subject matter.
Mika went first during the March 11 edition of Morning Joe, shamelessly claiming Musk “referred to the federal spending programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, as the areas that need to be eliminated."
Fact check: False. The clip she played from the Kudlow show literally begins with Musk referring to “the waste report in entitlement spending” and noted that most of federal spending is entitlements — $1.56 trillion was paid out just to Medicare and Medicaid and another $1.35 trillion just to Social Security in FY2023 alone, not counting other entitlement programs. So that context alone makes sense when Musk followed by saying, “So that’s the big one to eliminate. That’s a half-trillion — maybe six-$700 billion a year.”
It’s obvious that he’s talking about eliminating waste, not ending the programs entirely.
Scarborough doubled down on this blatant falsehood later in the segment: “Elon Musk didn’t say we’re going after waste, fraud and abuse in Medicare. What he said was we got to get rid of Social Security and Medicare.” No, that's not what Musk said!
In fact, Kudlow even clarified during his interview with Musk that the billionaire wasn’t out to change “policy” as opposed to fixing the “fiscal mechanisms” that are to make sure that payments properly get from point A to point B with...government efficiency.
For good measure, Scarborough would later replay the video Mika used that had Musk beginning his comments to Kudlow with the phrase “the waste report.” Musk said later in the Kudlow interview that he was “here to eliminate waste and fraud.” Derp.
What’s even crazier was Scarborough revealing that he has absolutely no clue how much the federal government spends on Medicare per year: “Do you know how much money was spent on Medicare last year? About $80 billion dollars! [Musk is] talking about the whole kit and caboodle,” Scarborough yelled.
If that seems kind of low to you, it’s because it is. The federal government actually spent $912 billion on Medicare last year, not $80 billion, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He's only off by 800-plus billion!
In addition, the network falsely accused Musk of saying in the interview that dead people were getting Social Security (SSA) checks, when he was only pointing out the number of dead people listed within the SSA database. Musk didn’t once suggest in that interview that SSA checks specifically were necessarily going to dead people, only that the database was in itself severely flawed at the least.
Scarborough launched the word “lie” at Musk at least six times. The chyron during the segment emphasized Scarborough's strawman: "Fact Check: Tens of Millions of Dead People Aren't Getting Social Security Checks."
Musk went on to discuss with Kudlow the number of older Americans in the Social Security database that did not have a date of death in their entries. “Why are the 20 million people that are definitely dead marked as alive in the Social Security database?”
This seems like a very reasonable question to ask, since the Office of the Inspector General’s 2023 audit, which Scarborough later referenced, found that “18.9 million numberholders” have “dates of birth in 1920 or earlier but no corresponding death information on their Numident record.” Musk also questioned why the Small Business Administration issued hundreds of millions in loans to children and borrowers over 115 years old, as the Department of Government Efficiency reportedly uncovered.
As Musk noted in a February 28 interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, other agencies rely on Social Security database data to determine eligibility for payments. Ironically, the Inspector General report Scarborough displayed also noted that failing to update the SSA's Death Master File "could result in erroneous payments by Federal benefit-paying agencies that use the DMF to detect inaccurate or unreported deaths."
These programs are where DOGE should start. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report on March 26, 2024 finding that of the $236 billion “improper” payments doled out by the federal government last year, “About $186 billion (79%) of such errors were concentrated in five program areas,” which included Medicare and Medicaid. In fact, reported the GAO, Medicare and Medicaid were two of the top three programs that “have consistently been among those with the highest payment errors.”
PS: Musk also hammered Democrats for using the age-old allure of government benefits to attract illegal immigrants to swell their voter base. But Scarborough bent Musk’s comments into a pretzel to cry racism: “He said the fraudulent programs are used to lure brown people into the United States." That's not what he said. No "fact checkers" will get involved when it's MSNBC.
